Totally Stockholm 1
Issue #14 Issue #16 Issue #14 – The Stockholmer –
a case study In our case study of the Stockholmer, from our 14th issue, we investigated the past, the present and the future of the Stockholmer. Now that that time has come, and perhaps gone, we can revisit and take stock. This was seven years ago, but the comments all sound remarkably current. The past is still the past of course, but the statements about the present and the future sound like they could have been said today. Trend expert Stefan Nilsson from Trendgruppen gave us his take on the present, which of course is now technically the past, but his argument stands. “Stockholm is sometimes referred to as one of the trendiest cities in the world. Why does the average Stockholmer feel the urge to keep up with what goes on in the world? Stockholmers and Swedes – and also Scandinavians in general – are curious by nature. This is a positive character trait. We are inquisitive when it comes to new phenomena outside of our nation’s borders. Compare this to for example Italians, Spaniards and Americans , who are mostly interested in what goes on within their own country. What are the cons to this curiosity? Stockholm is extremely homogeneous. We are all interested in the same trends, and we have an exorbitant need to blend in. So we generally choose to adapt a trend in a very restrained way.” 10 Issue #16 – Hipsters are people too – Investigating how Södermalm scored on the hipster scale. In connection with the making of our “New York-issue” – complete with interviews with scores of former Stockholmers who were too cool for school and had relocated to New York to live out their fantasies – we also looked into the strong influx of new hipsters, which was the prevailing trend at the time and most visible on Södermalm. At the time anything labelled with the word ‘Brooklyn’ could be bottled and sold by the bucketload. Which became evident when word got out that Brooklyn Lager’s second biggest market after New York, by far, in fact wasn’t any other American city but.... yeah, you guessed it. We weren’t the only publication to pick up on it. Grub Street, New York had a story titled “Så Brooklyn: How Kings County Became the Coolest Thing in Sweden”. Anyway, here go my words from back in the day on Stockholmers, social codes and hipsterdom: “Definition of HIPSTER A person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion) Origin of HIPSTER First Known Use: 1940 Rhymes with HIPSTER Quipster, tipster The passage above is from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and among the comments online, one Elena Maria says: “I have seen it used a lot and many times in a mocking way.” Correct enough. The word became an insult about 20 minutes after it arrived in Stockholm, which pretty much says it all about hipsterism in general and in Stockholm in particular. One of the cornerstones of hipster culture is naturally the goal of being cooler than the next person - as soon as something shows the merest hint of becoming mainstream, the hipster needs to move on to keep their advantage. The problem in Stockholm though, which Miike Snow singer Andrew Wyatt calls attention to in an interview in that issue of Totally Stockholm, is that it seems almost frowned upon to express your personality too much here – unless you are a rock star or a New Yorker. Andrew himself – being both – does alright on his visits, but he has a point. He thinks it probably comes down to the social codes developed over hundreds of cold and dark winters. But what Stockholmers, fearful of expressing their personalities in any manner that might disturb this rock-solid Swedish behaviour code, have done is to move in unison and morph into this coherent mass of hipsterdom.” After this we went through a neighbourhood’s recipe for hipster success and compared Södermalm with New York’s Williamsburg, and LA’s Silver Lake. One of the main criteria that Forbes used when ranking the world’s hippest neighbourhoods, along with the number of coffee shops per capita, food trucks and farmer’s markets, was ‘walkability’. Something you could look up through a site called Walkscore, where we found that Södermalm as a whole scored 70, rising to 77 if your starting point was Nytorget or 83 if it was Bergsunds Strand. This compared pretty well with Silver Lake’s score of 78 while being a few steps behind Williamsburg’s 93 and San Fran’s Missions District scoring of 94.